


the eve of your labours

by sharkfights (feartown)



Category: Orphan Black (TV)
Genre: F/F, also this needs some polishing but not enough to not post it, i just put the higher rating to cover my bases bc idk what yall freaks find too kinky for t, pedantry!, you should consider this on the hard side of t and the soft side of m
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-10-16
Updated: 2017-10-16
Packaged: 2019-01-18 04:45:25
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,297
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12381162
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/feartown/pseuds/sharkfights
Summary: It’s impossible to forget that she’s a creation first and a person second. It’s even more impossible to forget it’s under Delphine’s rule that she’s become a person again this time, as delicate as her hold on it may be.And for all her joking, whenever she looks in a mirror she thinks it might be a monster who stares back at her unblinkingly.rachel, s3.





	the eve of your labours

**Author's Note:**

> let the record state that at the time of writing this i have pinkeye, that infection little dirty children get when they don't wash their hands after going to the bathroom, and i've had the taste of antibiotic eyedrops at the back of my throat for a full goddamn week and i'm stuck inside and i hate it and i have asked my doctor multiple times if i could go back to work if i wore an eyepatch and she just. doesn't think i'm serious. i'm very serious
> 
> anyway uh this is just a fic for @piggy09 where delphine and rachel make out and there's a lot of allusions to frankenstein which she didn't ask for but its hilarious to me so w/e. i love u natalie!!!

* * *

 

Agricola is not what Rachel would call thrilling. 

Scott is too giddy as he explains the rules, and Rachel would roll her eyes if the effect weren’t severely diminished by the eye patch. 

“So you have to be strategic in the way you make decisions; obviously you can’t just have a bunch of kids if you don’t have anything to feed them, and--”

“Scott,” Rachel says, unable to sound wretched but feeling completely so, “I can--I will learn. On the way.”

“Right. Of course,” Scott says, scared of her and not even trying to hide it. 

Delphine still hovers at the back of the room off and on, entering data on the computer and leaving to take calls in her office before coming back. Rachel is aware of her the whole time; the clack of her heels and the way her eyes flash toward them as Scott continues to talk.

It should irk her to see Delphine like this. So carbon-copy, so desperately trying to “do her part” as a mechanism in this well-oiled behemoth. Rachel wonders if Delphine has realised the irony apparent in trying to look like a clone, like one of the club she wants so badly to be a part of. 

There’s something about this version of Delphine that fascinates her though; the sharpness of her tone and the shoes that make her tower over almost everyone. Some small beast in Delphine is happy doing this job, happy being Rachel. 

Rachel likes it when people think they can be her. 

  
  


 

 

Reluctantly, she finds herself getting the hang of the stupid game, after she gives away her horse and accidentally starves out her children. Beside them, Delphine takes Rachel’s blood pressure and frowns to herself, forgetting to be rough with her hands as she unrolls Rachel’s sleeve and smooths it back down her arm.

“Thank you, Dr, Cormier,” she says carefully. “Is the monster..." she points clumsily to herself, "...doing well?”

Delphine looks at her for a moment. “If you are the monster, then perhaps you shouldn’t be calling me Dr. Cormier.”

Rachel pulls her lips between her teeth. “You would prefer Dr. Fr--Fr...an. Fr--Fr--”

“Frankenstein,” Scott provides helpfully.

Both Delphine and Rachel glare at him, and he goes back to his cards.

Rachel knows Delphine doesn’t want her to get better. Delphine’s skin prickles whenever she thinks she might be able to see a positive change in Rachel; when she thinks she can see whatever thing it is that drags her a little further out of the sea, like a creature Delphine wants to keep beneath the waves.

It gives Rachel flashbacks to things she can’t quite remember, tubes and drips and men with lowered voices. Fluorescent lights. The smell of a lab, of sterility. All that white is a far cry from Victor Frankenstein’s 18th century apartment, but something rings true about it all the same.

It’s impossible to forget that she’s a creation first and a person second. It’s even more impossible to forget it’s under Delphine’s rule that she’s become a person again this time, as delicate as her hold on it may be. 

And for all her joking, whenever she looks in a mirror she thinks it might be a monster who stares back at her unblinkingly.

  
  


 

 

She can imagine Delphine’s face when the request that she wants to see her comes across her desk. She will say  _ Rachel _ under her breath, roll the ‘r’; her brow will furrow. She’ll consider not coming down; it’ll be in a bid to throw her weight around, make Rachel remember who’s in charge. But curiosity will get the best of her eventually.

  
  


 

 

There’s a bottle of nail polish on the table amidst Agricola cards and Rachel’s childish paintings. It’s a cloudy silver and something about it makes Rachel feel calm. It’s among a litany of things she can’t quite grasp the meaning of still, something that sits too out of reach for her struggling brain - but she knows she wants to wear it. She knows it will feel  _ better _ to wear it.

Scott has drawn the line at painting nails, as though he has dignity to uphold, and Rachel can’t put it on herself. There’s only one other person who might consider doing it for her now, so when Delphine walks in ready for some kind of ambush Rachel just points to the bottle.

“Have you called me down here so you can give me a gift, Rachel?” Delphine asks, picking up the bottle in her long fingers. “It’s not really my colour.”

She makes to put the polish back on the table, but Rachel gestures between them, trying to put as little effort into the movements as possible. She notices Delphine's fingernails are still red.

“You. Paint my....”

Delphine’s expression is impossible to read, but Rachel thinks there might be something like longing in it; a call somewhere in her to calm the storm she has drawn around herself for a moment. Take the armour off. It’s strong, Rachel can tell. She doesn’t have friends here anymore, there’s no one to siphon trust into or even get a drink with.

Still, she’s smart enough to smell a trap. 

“What do you want for this, Rachel? Information? Is it a power grab? Or are you just going to murder me with it?”

Rachel shakes her head. She’s so close to a win, so close to getting something she wants, however small it may be. “There’s no a--a. A--ag--”

“You’re awake, Rachel, which means there is definitely an agenda.”

But she doesn’t put the nail polish down. Poor Delphine, still in possession of enough empathy to help even someone she swore she would ruin. She sits on the side of Rachel’s bed and crosses her legs, uncapping the bottle and reaching for one of Rachel’s hands, resting it on her thigh.

Delphine paints Rachel’s nails in silence, her hair billowing out over her shoulders like a sail. Objectively she’s stunning, a Greek goddess who walked off a plinth one day and into the world. Focused in this close it’s easy for Rachel, next to her, to feel like she’s been cobbled together, all yellow-skinned and haphazardly stitched. Her body still feels nothing like her own, and having Delphine sauntering around like an Amazon makes Rachel feel thoroughly abhorrent. She’s not used to feeling like that, what she’s used to is commanding armies with a single look. She must remind Scott to bring her some lipstick.

Scott reminds her of something she wanted to ask, so she waits until Delphine finishes painting the first hand and is reaching for the second. Instead of letting her have it, Rachel takes Delphine’s hand in a hard grip and it makes Delphine look up at her.

It’s infuriating, how hard it is to get words out. They sit at the back of her throat and have to claw their way out of her mouth blind, because her brain has forgotten the way. She hates Delphine for enjoying it, a smirk hiding under her lips and behind her eyes as she waits.

“Who is Sh-hay?” she finally manages to ask, and revels in the look of hatred Delphine tries to conceal at the name.

“A friend of Cosima’s,” Delphine replies, feigning nonchalance and untangling Rachel’s hand from hers, setting it back on her thigh. Rachel lets her, but wills the muscles in her fingers to stretch, to feel the way Delphine’s thigh slopes and softens under the pressure of her hand.

“Liar,” Rachel says.

“How did you find out about her?” Delphine asks, ignoring the jab. “You don’t have any access to files or visitor logs.” 

“Scott… let it--let it slip. Earlier.”

Delphine recrosses her legs on the bed and huffs, resettling Rachel’s hand and starting to paint again.

“He is the worst kind of liability,” Delphine says grumpily, swiping a nail down the edge of Rachel’s thumb, right against the cuticle where some polish has bled onto her skin. Rachel likes the slice of silver that marrs Delphine’s otherwise perfect red now, and she continues on like Rachel isn’t studying her with the intensity of a hawk. 

“Are you jealous? Of her?” Rachel wants to know, wanting to hear the satisfied hiss of  _ yes _ between Delphine’s pearly teeth. 

“Cosima thinks so, but my concerns are for security.”

The hard line of Delphine’s mouth says otherwise, and Rachel licks one of her canines in glee. It’s too easy. Finding Delphine’s weak spots should be a game, a search, but they’re just waiting to be coaxed out from under the surface of her skin.

Tilting her head, Delphine finishes Rachel’s pinky finger, muttering in French that she made a mess of it.

Unconsciously, Rachel thinks, Delphine picks up her hand and holds the flat of it against her palm, a thumb resting over Rachel’s knuckles. She lifts Rachel’s hand to her mouth and blows, drying the polish; inspecting. Finding tiny silver splotches and nicking them away. 

Delphine shouldn’t have forgotten so quickly that the hand she holds is attached to someone she detests so much. How unbecoming it is of a budding dictator. She wants to tell Delphine that, but the sentence is too long and she doesn’t think she can find the nuance of it. Her consonants need to click and bite, right now it’s hard for them to even come out in the right order. 

Instead, in one relatively smooth motion, Rachel grabs Delphine’s chin in one freshly-painted hand and turns her head toward her. 

“We can change your concerns,” Rachel says, and it surprises both of them when they hear how crisp that statement sounds. 

“I’m not jealous,” Delphine says firmly.

Rachel feels a smile spread across her face at the same time a shadow passes over Delphine’s. She realises her mistake at the same time she realises Rachel meant for her to make it, meant to play her. But she doesn’t move her jaw out of Rachel’s hold on it.

She pulls Delphine’s face toward her, but she feels like Delphine was already on her way. She expects to feel hesitance, even repulsion, because she knows something inside Delphine is screaming. Rachel is perhaps the last person in this building Delphine should be kissing, and she has to hate herself for it. 

But Delphine doesn’t kiss like she’s repulsed. She kisses like this was inevitable, her lips warm and her hands bold.

In what feels like a miracle, Rachel doesn’t need her brain to tell her body how to do this. Her mouth and her limbs know how to move on their own - her teeth sinking into Delphine’s bottom lip, her hand at the base of Delphine’s throat; thumb pressed heavily into the hollow between her collarbones. She can feel Delphine’s heart there, thudding up from beneath its cage of ribs. It feels hungry against Rachel’s thumb and she wants to feel more of it, wants to hold the thing in her hand and let it damply pulse.

They kiss between gasps of breath, Delphine's anger at Cosima - at Rachel - as palpable as her heartbeat. Rachel sucks Delphine's lip into her mouth, hopes it makes her forget.

One of Delphine’s hands cups the back of her head - too gently, too much concern in her fingers for how broken Rachel is. Rachel opens her mouth and lets her palm ride up Delphine’s ribs, against the side of her breast. That finds a new gear in Delphine; her tongue sweeps over Rachel’s teeth and she groans faintly, like it’s a sound she wanted to hold back.

It’s delicious that Delphine is far too soft at the core of her, taking to affection as though she’s been starved of it. Maybe she has, Rachel thinks, but doesn’t care enough to wonder more than that. 

The longer Rachel kisses Delphine the stronger she feels, like life itself is humming through her veins, waking up the smaller parts of her she thought she’d lost. 

Delphine’s hips are gently rocking somewhere around Rachel’s knee, her whole long-limbed body strewn across Rachel like debris. They’re both brimming with being alive, and Rachel wants to suck Delphine dry of it. Like if she can kiss Delphine for long enough, she can take back what it feels like Delphine has stolen. She could walk out of here, shiny and new. Not half-blind, not half-dead and chewed up and spat out again.

She could reclaim her throne. 

In reality, her body is tiring. She could have Delphine on her back, she could touch Delphine with one finger and have her writhing in a way it would delight her to see. She could find out how wet Delphine is, how wet Rachel  _ knows _ she is. She would be happy to keep kissing Delphine just because she’s very good at it, and even a monster deserves happiness.

But she’s tired. Down in her bones she’s tired; her head aches from focusing for so long with just one eye. 

Delphine feels her falter and pulls away. Eyes dark, mouth red. She wants to know if Rachel is okay, and doesn’t want to ask.

“You can go,” Is all Rachel says.

Delphine straightens out her blouse and wipes her mouth with the back of her hand. Standing up, she looks hard at Rachel for a minute, like there’s something else she wants to say.

Rachel thinks it might involve the word ‘bitch’.

“You’ll think of me. Later,” she says, and Delphine knows exactly what she means. 

The door shuts behind Delphine and Rachel looks at the nail polish bottle abandoned on the bed. She holds up her hands and looks at her nails. Not a mark on them.

It may only be a step, but at least it’s in the right direction.

**Author's Note:**

> me earlier: so i guess rachel and delphine making out would be like a lot of blood and swearing  
> me writing this fic: actually i think that delphine would paint rachel's nails and then they would just kiss normally


End file.
